Love in Chief: A Novel

The waiting-room of Dr. Maude’s surgery at Monkswell was sparely furnished with guests, mainly because the December weather was of that mild and unseasonable type commonly called unhealthy. The darkness outside was pierced by a fine, invisible rain, borne on a south wind, and the waiting-room, though heat as well as light was spread only by a single gas-burner, was not cold. One patient was with the doctor; the details of his complaint could have been overheard by the others if they had cared to listen, but they did not; sufficient unto them were their own diseases. Five centres of self-complacent misery were sitting on a cane-seated bench; the sixth person was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. The only other representative of the male sex was eight years old, and had come to have a tooth out; too stolid to feel nervous, he sat sucking peppermints. His mother, in a decent black mantilla and a square-fronted bonnet trimmed with red chrysanthemums, was talking to a girl with a baby about wrongs invisible to the unjaundiced eye. The young mother’s dark eyes and delicate features had the remains of real beauty, though two years of matrimony had made her middle-aged; her pretty young sister, sitting beside her, showed what she must have been. The baby was not handsome; its pinkish-purple face was framed in a yellow woollen hood, and the colour which should have tinged its cheeks had settled upon its ugly little button of a nose and on its chin. It wheezed; the mother coughed loosely; the girl stared before her; the young man also coughed, but inobtrusively. He did not give to phthisis its due dignity.

The surgery presently discharged its patient and received the small martyr to toothache. The young man took the seat left vacant; and the gaslight, falling on his face, showed thin, brown features, eyebrows strongly arched and strongly marked, and bright, vagrant eyes which took an interest in everything. He edged a little closer to the young mother and looked inquiring. Finding that did not answer, he plunged into conversation with a speech which was admirable in sentiment but not discreet in wording.

“Jolly baby, that.”

“Yes, he was a fine boy,” said the girl, her tired eyes quickening as she looked down at her child, “but he’s after his teeth now, and it’s pulled him daouwn awful. We didn’t have a wink of sleep with him last night.”

“You must be pretty tired, then,” quoth the stranger. “Wonder if the little chap would come to me?”

“He don’t like strangers,” said the mother, doubtfully. She was unused to hear her boy called either a jolly baby or a little chap; and she distrusted the abilities of a young man, plainly unmarried, moreover, who used such terms.

“I’ll hold him like a patent rocking-chair,” the stranger asserted. “Come on, sonny. You won’t howl at me, will you? Great land, what a weight you are! I never turned ayah before—yes, put my eye out, will you? What’s wrong besides the teeth?”

“He’s got a touch of bromtitus; I caught it washing-day, and he took it from me. Oh, it’s crool work washing in the winter; our houses hasn’t any coppers, and we has to do it all out at the back.”

“Do you mean you wash the clothes in the open air?”

“Every mite of ’em. My husband he’s been to the landlord times and again, but he won’t do nothing for us; and they’re the cheapest houses round, so we just have to put up with it.”

“What a beastly shame! Who’s your landlord?”

“Old Fane, up at Fanes. Ah, he is a hard man. Last time as Mr. Searle went to see him, ‘You can take or leave it,’ he says; ‘I can get plenty more as won’t complain. I will not be pestered with discontented gutter-birds,’ he says. So my husband he come away; there wasn’t nothing to be done.”

“Fane, I think you said,” said the brown-eyed stranger, upon whose face the tale had painted a gleeful anticipation, as he took down the name in a pocket-book. “I’m thinking I’d like a little friendly conversation with Mr. Fane. Whereabouts is your place?”

“Burnt House, they call it; right out in the fields it is. If he’d put in one copper for the six houses, you wouldn’t think he’d ever miss the money. But he don’t care about us poor folks. I wish we was in Farquhar’s houses, that I do.”

Conversation was here broken by Dr. Maude, who summoned Mrs. Searle and her sister and the baby. Her short interview left her in tears. The doctor had ordered milk, which seemed to her as far beyond her means as caviare or turtle-soup. It would be got, but meanwhile Mrs. Searle would starve, Mr. Searle would swear, and the debt at the shop would grow. The stranger gave her a shilling, and fled into the surgery to escape her thanks.

The place smelt strong of drugs; shelves laden with bottles climbed up one wall, and the others were decorated with framed photographs and cases of medical books. Everything was strictly professional and methodically neat; and the doctor, slight and dark in appearance, cool and composed in manner, was the essence of his room embodied.